Lower Archaeology

So we started a journal…

At the time that I started this blog, I wasn’t attached to any university at all, which made keeping up with research – too often locked away in expensive to access journals – a pain. Things have improved, more and more researchers are self-archiving their work online for example through services like academia.edu, but I made it my mission back to try to help make research more widely available. Late last year, I published a paper on bryozoans in archaeology, and when I was looking for venue to submit it, I realised that Quaternary science and environmental archaeology are quite poorly served for so-called open access journals. I eventually published in Internet Archaeology, which is paywalled but has very liberal policies about how I can disseminate the paper. At the time I (semi-jokingly) wrote on Twitter that I was this close to starting a new journal. Happily, Suzanne Pilaar Birch and Victoria Herridge saw the potential in the idea, and so yesterday, after about six months of planning, and with the involvement of Ubiquity Press and an excellent and supportive editorial board, Open Quaternary opened its call for papers. I’m incredibly excited for the coming months – we’re planning the first issue for September. Watch this space!

Great to see this, I’m guessing any archaeology articles should have an environmental focus? I have a geoarchaeology paper that is almost ready to submit somewhere but it’s more on identifying formation processes and activities…